Range Anxiety vs. Reality in New EVs
It wasn’t too many years ago the term ‘range anxiety’ entered the gearhead lexicon, standing in for the phenomenon of EV buyers suddenly being concerned about reaching their destination before running out of electrons.
Range anxiety has been around for ages, of course - just ask anyone whose old-school beater had a rusty gas tank which couldn’t be filled up more than halfway. That strangely specific example might be unique to your author and his terrible parade of hoopties back in the day. Nevertheless, that range anxiety could be easily resolved with a quick pit stop at a gas station. Refilling an EV battery is slightly more complicated. And time consuming.
[Images: Hyundai, Lucid, Kia]
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It can take a spell for reality to catch up to perception, especially if the subject is a particularly useful political or socio-economical football. Look how long it took for some overseas car brands to shed a wonky reliability reputation, or the amount of time a city needed to rehab its tourism industry even long after cleaning up its crime stats. The same goes for EVs; early examples of the breed weren’t of much use beyond short urban trips in terms of range, limited by the era’s technology and its cost.
It can take a spell for reality to catch up to perception, especially if the subject is a particularly useful political or socio-economical football. Look how long it took for some overseas car brands to shed a wonky reliability reputation, or the amount of time a city needed to rehab its tourism industry even long after cleaning up its crime stats. The same goes for EVs; early examples of the breed weren’t of much use beyond short urban trips in terms of range, limited by the era’s technology and its cost. These days, the energy density of modern EV batteries has gone up whilst the cost of assembly and raw materials have gone down. For those unfamiliar, energy density is the term used to describe the amount of power, measured in kWh, can be packed into a battery of a certain size. Sure, installing an enormous battery could extend range (here’s looking at you, GM pickups) but do so at the expense of weight and other considerations. Instead, it is far better to develop high density batteries like so-called solid state units which can contain plenty of kWh in a small footprint.
Some long range EVs are priced into the stratosphere, such as certain trims of the Lucid Air, a car which recently set the Guinness World Record for total distance driven by an EV on a single charge.(749 miles between Switzerland and Germany). Megabucks models don’t help the average buyer, of course, but it’s worth noting several affordable electric cars have total range estimates which are very long-legged.
For example, the $42,800 rear-wheel drive Hyundai Ioniq 6 SE has a posted range of 342 miles, more than most people can travel without wanting to stop and use the facilities assuming that’s about 5-ish hours of steady driving.
The challenge at that point, at least compared to a vehicle powered by traditional internal combustion, is the time required for refilling the battery once it is flat. Even connected to the most robust 800V Level 3 DC fast charger, it will take about 20 minutes to charge the thing from about 10 - 80 percent. That’s lightning quick for an EV but far adrift of an ICE car and also assumes the charger is belting out electrons at peak efficiency for the entire session.
Also note it takes extra time to top up that last 20 percent thanks to battery limitations (think about how you slow down filling a glass with water as you reach the top). It’s a complicated subject, to be sure. But with some EVs priced far south of today’s average cost of a new car being able to travel 300 miles or more on a single charge, the bottleneck may now be with replenishment - not range.
